Green Roofs - Living Architecture Monitor - Summer 2013 - (Page 1)

FROM THE FOUNDER EMBRACING CHANGE: GREEN ROOFS AND WALLS – SOLUTIONS TO OUR INFRASTRUCTURE DEFICIT N ecessity, it is often said, is the mother of invention— and the necessity for new infrastructure investment is at an all time high! Not only are climate and weather patterns stressing existing systems, government coffers are running on empty, and political gridlock makes raising new revenues from citizens and corporations difficult. So now, more than ever, we need new ways of doing business, of raising capital and maintenance budgets, of accounting for the full costs and benefits of the services provided, of incorporating life-cycle approaches to decision making and taking advantage of stacking benefits. Stacking benefits: a new gas power plant to deliver peak load demand energy is the old model. The new model would be investing the $600 million required for the gas plant into thousands of green roofs and walls, reflective roofs, urban forests and bioswales. This would help eliminate the need for the new power plant by reducing the urban heat island effect, while also cleaning the air, providing shade, managing stormwater, producing food, protecting biodiversity and generating green jobs. Green roofs, walls and other forms of green infrastructure deliver stacking public and private benefits at different scales in the short and long term. These technologies challenge us to make infrastructure decisions differently. The old, siloedgovernance and regulatory models for water and energy infrastructure are largely broken. They emphasize supplying commodities over wise use, and ultimately contribute to our fiscal challenges and infrastructure deficits. This Business Case issue of the LAM is full of new approaches to understanding the true value proposition of these technologies and how to derive even greater value from them. For example, the life cycle case study conducted for the City of Portland (pg. 12) not only provides a holistic approach to understanding green roof values, but also a new method of incorporating the ‘biodiversity’ or ‘habitat’ value of projects. The YMCA green roof (pg. 26) shows how a participatory community engagement process not only helped to ensure satisfied green roof customers, but also reduced installation READ THIS ISSUE ONLINE AT WWW.LIVINGARCHITECTUREMONITOR.COM and maintenance costs. Marguerite Wells provides us with some insight into growing profitable green roof plants (pg. 24). We also talked with several owners of past Award of Excellence winning projects to see if their green roofs and walls continue to perform and what lessons they have learned. We tracked down the former California Energy Commissioner, Dr. Arthur Rosenfeld, to get his take on white and green roofs, and California’s Title 24 policy. There is also an overview of a new paper (pg. 8) that provides a simple method to calculate the public benefits of supportive public green infrastructure investment, drawing on multiple studies conducted over the past 10 years. It seeks to provide decision makers with an answer to the question: “If I spend $100 million on green roof incentives, what is the public return on investment?” Our capacity as a society to invent and implement new technologies, practices, business models and governance approaches that support the wide spread use of living architecture will ultimately determine how successful we are at responding to the challenges of limited public and private funding, and the growing infrastructure deficit, coupled with the extreme weather events that have become all too common over the past decade. Go online and sign on to our Green Infrastructure Declaration so we can send a strong message for change to policy makers (www.greenroofs.org/ declaration). We are launching The Great Community Resiliency Project in advance of CitiesAlive in San Francisco October 23-26, to gather all of the best ideas we have to move our communities in the direction of greater well-being and resiliency. We invite you to share your ideas with us on how living architecture can help us become more resilient and support change! Sincerely, Steven W. Peck, GRP, Hon. ASLA Founder & President, GRHC LIVING ARCHITECTURE MONITOR / SUMMER 2013 / 1 http://www.greenroofs.org/declaration http://www.greenroofs.org/declaration http://WWW.LIVINGARCHITECTUREMONITOR.COM

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Green Roofs - Living Architecture Monitor - Summer 2013

Green Roofs - Living Architecture Monitor - Summer 2013
Contents
From the Founder
Green Roof Installation Raises Value of Boston Apartment by $2.4 Million
Green Roof Industry Grows by 24 Percent in 2012 & Washington Dc Is #1
Burgeoning Green Roofs and Green Walls Market to Be Worth $7.7 Billion in 2017
Green Roofs Designated as Certified Wildlife Habitats by National Wildlife Federation
On the Roof With … Art Rosenfeld
Estimating Green Roof Benefits
Mind Mapping the Business Case
The Business Case for Investing in Green Roofs in Portland
CITIESALIVE San Francisco Preview
Policy and Standards
Leadership – for the Sake of the Client and the Environment:
Plant – Profitable Green Roof Plants
Project – It Takes a Village: YMCA
Project – Was It Worth It?
New Corporate Members
Professional Calendar
New and Improved Green Roof Training
Submit a Project to the 2013 Awards of Excellence
Journal of Living Architecture Call for Papers
Great Community Resiliency Project Contest
GRHC Buyers Guide
The Case for Green Façades

Green Roofs - Living Architecture Monitor - Summer 2013